Dolly Parton Prepared Us For The End

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day or to the fact that she did all that only to be outsung, and in some quarters, almost entirely eclipsed by Houston’s cover. I know that I saw a variation on that tweet a couple of times before I actually sought out Parton’s original recording. I remember finding it a bit boring. The story goes that “I Will Always Love You” was written as a sort of parting gift to Parton’s mentor Porter Wagoner, who introduced Parton to the world in the ’60s on his long-running nationally syndicated musical variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. The two worked together through the late ’60s and early ’70s before Parton decided to do what she came to Nashville to do: become her own star. In a stripped down 2009 performance, Parton recounts how Wagoner took the news. “When I started working with Porter, I told him I had come to Nashville to be my own star and to have my own group. But the money was so good that I told [him] I would stay for 5 years. And he agreed to that. Well, 5 years came and…I told him I wanted to go out on my own. He was just having a fit about it. We argued a lot and I thought, he’s never going to listen to me. He’s not hearing a word I’m saying…So, I went home, wrote a song about it, came back the next day and I said, ‘Porter, just sit down, let me sing you something, then you’ll know how I feel.’”

Read it at Defector ↗

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